Music Documentary Downloaded: Alex Winter on the Lingering Legacy of Napster

Remember Napster? A dozen years after its original, meaningful incarnation collapsed under the weight of legally induced bankruptcy, the paradigm-shattering file-sharing service can seem almost quaint, a hazy memory from the time before iTunes, torrents, Spotify, and Pirate Bay.

But Napster’s reverberations echoed far behind its first life, which lasted less than two years. (It still exists, at least in name and familiar kitty-with-headphones logo, as a Rhapsody-affiliated music subscription service.) That Napster went down in a hail of lawsuits launched by a recording industry that had barely begun to contemplate new digital business models when what seemed like all the music in the world suddenly became available for free online. As Alex Winter’s new music documentary Downloaded posits, the question of whether Napster = stealing, as Lars Ulrich and Dr. Dre famously argued, turned out to be just the tip of a very large, very divisive iceberg, seeding still-simmering battles over copyright, freedom of information, even hacktivism and the Occupy movement.

Winter, the actor/filmmaker best known as the once and perhaps futureBill S. Preston Esq., spent much of the past 10 years trying to make a movie about Napster and its precocious founders, coding wizard/music geek Shawn Fanning and Facebook billionaire-to-be Sean Parker, who launched the company as teenagers in 1999. Ultimately produced under the aegis of VH1 Rock Docs, Downloaded eschews piracy polemics in favor of an in-depth recounting of Napster’s crazy ride and its culture-clash aftermath, taking in the views and experiences of Fanning, Parker, and their cohorts as well music industry brass and artists like Noel Gallagher, Henry Rollins, and DJ Spooky. Ahead of the movie’s March 10 world premiere at SXSW, MFW talked to Winter about his own Napster memories and the current, fractious state of the digital planet.

MFW: What was the genesis of the movie, and of your involvement?

Alex Winter: OK. Uh …

Long story, it sounds like.

Yeah. How do I put this? I was really of into technology and music. When Napster showed up it was a mind-blower for me. People were starting to link together, but they were hyper-specialized, and then suddenly with Napster in ’99 there was this massive internet community that just exploded out of nowhere. And it worked. It connected people very quickly, all over the world. It wasn’t just for internet-savvy people. It’s hard to describe the quantum leap forward Napster represented. I immediately started to look at who these guys were, what was going on. And then of course, pretty quickly, the whole legal, music downloading/file-sharing controversy exploded. Suddenly this thing that just appeared to me at first to be mostly about community turned into this very controversial file-sharing service, and then it became even more interesting because it looked like a watershed issue. So I connected with Fanning and Parker in 2002 and signed on to make a movie out of their story.

I wrote it to do as a narrative [feature] at a major studio, and it didn’t [happen], like a lot of movies that you work on at major studios. About three or four years ago I just started looking around and seeing how fractious everything still was. It was sort of shocking to me. Those of us that were involved in working on the movie, we assumed all this stuff would be long resolved by the mid-2000s. I thought, this story really needs to be told. But by then I realized it would do a lot more good as a doc than as a narrative.

Why?

A narrative is, and needs to be, really hyper-character driven. My movie was about two 17-year-old kids who were naïve, and admittedly disruptive, but not anarchists, and certainly not looking to break industries down. So my movie was largely about them, and the record business, and their personalities, their personal lives. What made it worth telling today, and absolutely timely – more timely than had I made it back in the Napster era – is that on a more global, topical level, all the issues that Napster was enmeshed in are really, really vital issues that we’re very much contending with today. A documentary is much better at focusing on those issues and less on the kind of soap opera aspects.

As an outsider it seems to me this wouldn’t be a story Hollywood would have wanted to tell in any way that was sympathetic to the principals, because Hollywood was about to be grappling with the same issues.

You know, I would love to say that my absolutely flawless, genius screenplay was something the power structure was not ready for. I’ll take it, thanks [laughs]. There’s so many people involved in trying to get a movie made, so many reasons why they don’t get made. That might have been a part of it, but I don’t know. As the creator of the project, you’re the very last person to know why your project’s in turnaround.

Were you a heavy user of Napster back in the day?

Absolutely! I had a production office in London at the time, and I think every single weekend I ran every single computer in the office. I think I broke a few computers doing it. The thing you have to remember is that I wasn’t filling my hard drive with the latest Don Henley album. I’m older, and I buy the music that I want. I was interested in really rare, mostly jazz bootlegs, live recordings. I was interested in stuff you could not get at the record store. I had amassed a really large live recording DAT [Digital Audio Tape] collection, so I was digitizing some of my collection, providing that to other people. This isn’t in the movie, but I was doing a lot of music videos and I remember having a meeting at Columbia Records on a music video I was working on. This was maybe 2000. A very high-up exec at Columbia was like, “We just used Napster to get a whole backlog of Coltrane that’s not in our archive. We now have it in the Columbia archive.” That’s pretty amazing. I wasn’t naïve to the fact that a lot of people were just using it to steal stuff, but that wasn’t what I was using it for.

The people who came after Napster were much more bald about what they were doing. Everybody dug in really hard.

I think that’s absolutely true. There were things [Napster] did that I didn’t completely agree with. There’s things they did that they don’t completely agree with, 10 years down the road. But I always felt, and I still feel now, that a lot of the misunderstanding about Napster is that they were just branded as pirates. While you could contend that they did not have a really sound idea of how to integrate with existing paradigms, and they were very young and very naïve and very disruptive, their business model was completely predicated on a need to license. They were built from the get-go to be a component of the record business. But you’re absolutely right, in the wake of Napster’s demise, the next round of people weren’t going to want to play ball with the labels. We’re now dealing with some very large, very well-heeled organizations that have absolutely no interest in being nice to the old paradigms and are perfectly happy giving everything away for free and making their own money off of advertising sales and subscription sales. That’s a whole other ethical debate.

My gut feeling has always been that one of the main things that drove the response to Napster and the things that came in its wake was people really feeling like they had been screwed and let down by the culture industries. While there’s always going to be a core of people who will take stuff because they can, most people were ready to pay for it if they felt like the terms were fair.

I was saying that 10 years ago, when everyone was branding me a pirate. I was like, if you can present me a model that works as well as Napster, I’ll happily pay for it. If you can present me a model that isn’t as good as Napster, I’ll pay for it, which is what iTunes was. iTunes is a pale comparison to the functionality of Napster. So is Spotify. I still think we’re in a very evolutionary part of this new terrain, and there aren’t that many great music models out there. But I’ll still pay for them, because I want to pay for the content I get. The thing about Napster is it was community, chat, an incredibly deep breadth of media distribution. It was finding really rare, really interesting music that you could not find anywhere else. That about the Napster era is what I miss. We live in a non-filtration garbage dump at the moment, and what Napster allowed you to do is create your own filters. That doesn’t exist today – not legitimately.

The genie that Napster uncorked wasn’t just about sharing music. It was one of the precursors to the much bigger discussions we’re having now about things like privacy and net neutrality – all these things springing from this big bang realization that the internet connects us all and isn’t another top-down information source.

People have asked me, when I went back into this story did I learn stuff? The thing that probably hit me the hardest was how angry, uneducated, and obstinate some people still were all these years later, in the post-Facebook, post-SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] era that we live in. That was shocking. I feel like we’ve had enough time. It doesn’t mean you just embrace having your stuff ripped off, but realizing that this is the world we’re in. I have compassion for those people. I don’t think they’re imbeciles. It just really brought home to me how formidable these changes are for the world. I’d say I’m a transitional generation. I was born in the ’60s. I was a vinyl junkie, and I certainly grew up in an analog world, to a point. I was also fairly young when things started to shift. It was easier for me to take a leap into the next world. I do understand that for people who were a generation before me, or are just completely entrenched in the existing paradigm even if they’re not my age or older, it’s almost imperceivable how much change they’re going to have to enact in how they do things.

You were in the movie industry, with an opportunity to watch other people in the industry. How were they viewing this when it was going on? Were they hip to the fact that it’s like, uh-oh, we’re next?

I don’t get the impression they really knew what was going on. I think they’re now beginning to get it. [Motion Picture Association of America CEO] Chris Dodd is beginning to make some pretty good comments about wanting more unification with the tech side. I think that there’s still a great lack of understanding on both sides about the way the other’s business works. I wouldn’t fault just the movie industry or the music industry on that, I’d also fault the digital industry. I don’t see how we’re going to progress until that problem is resolved, until both sides have a much clearer understanding of how these businesses work, so they can integrate. I don’t see anything other than integration working for the artist at the end of the day.

Integration in what way?

I mean that it’s one thing for Chris Dodd to say I’m now more open to talking to Google, or maybe SOPA was over-written, but I still don’t get a sense they understand how decentralized file systems work and how the world works in this space. By the same token, I don’t really know how well the digital music and digital entertainment companies that are sprouting up really understand much about artist development, or all the things the older paradigms are really good at. I don’t think there’s a way forward until both of those sides get better educated. One thing I do know is that we are bang in the middle of the skirmish. We are not at the end. We don’t have a resolution in sight at the moment.

I’ve read your Twitter feed so I know you‘ve aired views on some of these issues, like SOPA and net neutrality. What implications did that have for you approaching this as a documentary filmmaker?

The movie wasn’t about a pro or con SOPA argument, thankfully. The approach that I tried to take was a humanistic one. I genuinely feel enormous compassion and concern for both sides. That was my approach: rather than pull it to this side of the debate, just present the debate in a humanistic fashion, try to look at the argument on both sides and let those people talk. That’s the beauty of it being a doc and not a narrative. In a narrative there’s no way that it wouldn’t have been politicized. It’s just impossible. I’m putting words in everybody’s mouth.

God. Trying. No, that’s not really the right word. We’re in the middle of the normal process of getting a movie up on its feet. We’re in the middle of rewrites right now. Everything is fine, but it could be a ways before we go into production.